Cuban exiles

Cuban exiles are Cubans who fled from or left the island of Cuba following the Cuban Revolution of 1959. From the late 1950s to 1970s, several Cubans from the middle and upper classes fled due to the fear of widespread reprisals after Fidel Castro's communist takeover, with most of them heading to the United States; many of them joined the large Cuban community in Florida (which had existed since the Ten Years' War of the 1860s-1870s), while others moved to New Jersey, New York, and elsewhere in the USA. This first wave consisted mostly of political asylum-seekers. The second wave of emigrants, the Marielitos, arrived in the USA during and after the Mariel boatlift of 1980, and the majority of the second wave, who arrived in the USA from the 1980s and into the 2000s, were economic migrants. More than 1,000,000 Cubans went into exile in the USA and elsewhere. In Miami, Florida, hardline exiles created an environment in which moderation could be a dangerous position, and many exiles based in the USA and sixteen other countries took part in armed action against the communist regime, including the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, the bombing of Cubana Flight 455 in 1976, and other guerrilla and terrorist attacks.

In 2017, 2,315,863 Cubans or people of Cuban descent lived in the USA, with 70% of them living in Florida, which is just 90 miles north of Cuba. Most of them were members or descendants of the exile community, and, after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961, most Cuban exiles claimed that the Democratic president John F. Kennedy had abandoned Cuba. They began an alliance with the Republican Party, and most Cuban Americans were Republicans into the 2010s; Ronald Reagan was highly popular among Cuban-Americans for his staunch anti-communism and his opposition to Castro's exporting of the revolution to Africa and other parts of Latin America. In the 2016 presidential election, Republican candidate Donald Trump was supported by over 50% of Florida's Cubans.